I have around $300 to spend in a portable player with support for FLAC (my old rockbox ipod is done!) and it seems that Cowon X7, X9 and C2 are the ones within this range (please let me know about others). How would you compare them?

The roughly $30 Sansa Clip+ or Zip will play FLAC all day long out of the box (and rockboxable). So, what are the features you are wanting that are making you look at players in the neighborhood of 10x the cost?

Beside playing lossless files, a cowon player allows to watch videos, have some "proprietary" dsp effects , an important autonomy, and it's nice to see the cover art of each albums. Some more recent cowon player support android, with some limitations.If you just want to play lossless files, get a sansa clip.

EDIT: you might ask at iAudiophile.net forum, for further detail details regarding the difference between each cowon player.

Rockbox has been doing this for years. Embedded (some formats) and sidecar (all formats) art.

All right since you insist.My cowon s9 has 55 hours of autonomy for playing music. The sansa clip +/ zip allows 15h of music playback (which is 27% of my cowon s9).The sansa clip+ doesn't show cover arts. But yeah, the zip show them, but off course on my higher res amoled screen, the covert art looks greater.

The roughly $30 Sansa Clip+ or Zip will play FLAC all day long out of the box (and rockboxable). So, what are the features you are wanting that are making you look at players in the neighborhood of 10x the cost?

Take the sansa clip.Regarding storage, it's easy to extend it for the sansa clip+, thanks to the microSDHC expansion slot.Up to 15 h of playback according to the specifications, is more than enough.Flac is supported by sansa clip+.